There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there.
They do spike on different features like:
- snapshotting and forking
- good SSH and VPN access for end-users
- agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer
Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolated environments for your own work.
I've been working on some open-core stuff[1] to coordinate sandboxes, and we're making changes to have a library that lets people coordinate any number of remote or local sandboxes using any provider, kinda like how the Docker CLI works for managing containers, git repos, and coding agents. Flue[2] is another player in this space, and is more of a pure framework, while we're building it as an interactive product for using sandboxed agents and workflows.
My personal belief is that the future of an "app" is a combo:
1. micro VM
2. agent on the VM
3. software bundled into the VM
So, it should be stupid simple to run these local sandboxed apps/agents. Right now, not too hard for technical users (esp. with things like https://smolmachines.com/ and https://microsandbox.dev/), but not as easy as clicking an app icon or typing `/path/to/binary` in the CLI
I was going to add a comment praising smolmachines' smolvms. Simple, fast (sub-200ms cold start), OCI-compat, and has trivial packing to standalone 0-dep executables. No need for Docker Desktop / colima / orbstack. For those who prioritize security, kernel isolation is a meaningful benefit.
Microsandbox claims to start faster than docker, and it is isolated from the host, and to work with OCI. Why would I still want to use docker? The only reason I can imagine is that I actually want to be able to dynamically share resources between containers instead of dividing up VMs a priori.
Firecracker has more tooling for the orchestration layer that manages many sandboxes at once. Stuff like K8S integration, an external REST API control plane, more first-class support for snapshotting, etc.
What people aren't getting with `firecracker` is utilization. Don't get me wrong, `firecracker` is great software and it's what I'm using for lightweight virtualization, but workloads are really bursty over really short periods of time now, even with the snapshot and restore that you can get if you're willing to hack on `firecracker` substantially, you hit walls where it's like, this is too much against the grain, this thing wasn't designed to bounce from 1 core to 32 to 8 to 16 to 4 to 32 to 1 seamlessly, and that's what it takes to get extreme utilization even with extremely good ML on the prediction.
I am quite sure I'm not the only person working on post-firecracker KVM.
For those looking to run agents: the short lifecycle of the typical “sandbox” seems surprisingly limiting to me. I have no actual workflow where I want one of these products. Sometimes a VM can live for 30 minutes, but it also might need to live for a month, and I don’t know beforehand.
This is why I have been avoiding the word sandbox for exe.dev. I don’t think developers agents need something “sandbox” shaped.
It's about time AWS got into the agent sandbox game.
The startups in this space right now don't provide much value on top of the cloud providers they're wrapping. They don't tend to be run by experienced infra people either so they seem very vibecoded, insecure, janky, etc. They're also significantly overpriced because they're marking up already expensive providers.
Something surprising from my own experience is that while there's certainly a huge role for async agents in cloud sandboxes, async agents running locally seem more useful in many cases.
To be fair to jacobgold, at this point there is more or less an AWS services announcement singularity: if you didn't see the announcement when it happened you may never catch up or even find it in the wretched console website.
Though I did know about this one! (Because I saw the announcement.)
It just seems pretty different to me? I've lots of similar stuff and yet I still don't understand what it's for and how it works after scanning the docs quickly.
Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.
In that case it's still overpriced because they're charging hyperscaler prices without offering a hyperscaler level service in terms of scalability, reliability, security, trust, etc.
Most of the startups are just wrappers around AWS and significantly more expensive.
Agents need sandboxes that are cheaper so that they can run thousands
I feel that AWS, GCP and all the other cloud providers can provide this natively.
But still it would be nice to self host.
The best part of self hosting is that you own it as well, no rug pulls from the laundry list of reselling providers that could go away at anytime.
It would be nice to have a one click sandbox agent on a self hosted instance that is, free, fast (can pay a bit more for more intensive operations) and that is open source.
What's the best provider to self-host Firecracker? I feel that AWS is not a safe or cost-effective option for a self-funded startup or small business. Although is anything cost effective anymore? Hetzner just had a massive price hike.
Part of it might just be that I am old and inflation is catching up with my understanding of prices.
But as far as AWS I still have to say no thanks. Imagine some group actually started using my hosted AI agent service for something compute and network intensive. It could turn into $2000 overnight and if I didn't account for one of the numerous types of AWS charges, I might have only collected $500 for credits purchases.
Or it could easily be ten times that. But who am I kidding. No one is going to use my agents. So it doesn't matter if it's gvisor or Firecracker or whatever.
The simplest worthwhile DIY sandbox you can have is to layer two tools: bwrap and gvisor.
bwrap args -- gvisor args do args -- /path/sandboxee args
bwrap will set up the environment and then gvisor elevates it into a true sandbox.
Standalone gvisor (not the 'do' subcommand) used to be a mess with the OCI json requirement, but recently they began work on presenting their own bwrap interface (likely to pursue AI agent uses) though I wouldn't use it myself yet.
People often look down on gvisor because they think it's some kind of syscall filter, it is not. It can use one of ptrace, seccomp or even KVM to intercept ALL syscalls and service them with it's own logic (which is in Go). Basically it's a VMM and kernel in one.
Are you looking for highly ephemeral nodes, where you are writing automation that will use the API to orchestrate it? Or do you just want small microVMs that you launch and kill?
Firecracker just has a ReSTful unix socket with a defined API and launches KVM vms with limited options.
For custom SMB I still think libvirt is a lower entry cost and may have transferable use cases to longer lived VMs, so you can just launch a qemu microvm[0] and use virsh and/or libvirt xml to set up the networking.
The ~400ms boot time of a qemu microvm vs ~120ms for firecracker may not be an issue for some loads, but qemu will also allow you a bit more density of placement than firecracker. qemu microvms will use a bit more memory individually, but they will also tend to use less real system memory with a larger number of microVMs.
It is all tradeoffs, and kata containers are yet another option that may apply depending on your use case.
You can run your own firecracker or qemu/kvm microvms on most instances that allow nested hypervisors, or on a local host. If cost containment is critical to you this is one possible way forward.
Really it just depends on if you want/need ReSTful control, or need to support short lived serverless functions, or if CLIs fit better and you many want to support full VMs.
They both are just Virtual Machine Monitors that targeted different use cases and decided on different tradeoffs.
Just be careful about hosting traditional containers and microVMs on the same system, that config is going to be problematic do to fundamental reasons that are too complex to properly address here.
Why do you want to self-host vs. using one of the many providers out there?
Daytona, E2B, OpenComputer, Freestyle, Blaxel, Vercel, Modal, Cloudflare, Tensorlake, Superserve, etc. etc.
Some of them work by pre-purchasing credits, so you can control the blast radius of spend.
Also, if you want a more embedded sandbox runtime as a library instead of a daemon + REST API, you can check out libkrun (and friendly layers on top of it like https://microsandbox.dev/ and https://smolmachines.com/)
For self-hosting, have a look at what we're building with SlicerVM.com (disclosure: I'm the founder). Also runs just as well on Apple Silicon.
We run quite a few Slicer instances on mini PCs and Ryzen builds - also on Hetzner (and yes ouch 120 EUR / mo up to ~ 550 EUR / mo for 16core / 128GB RAM feels almost unfair)
Interesting. How does this compare to Firecracker? Also PhoenixNap looks really interesting. Do you happen to know if Linux software compatibility holds up on Ampere? 80 cores for $400 a month seems pretty good.
I specifically complained to a fly.io staff on here about their "gotcha, b*tch" usage based pricing which they basically copied from AWS, and they stood by it and other people here backed them up. No one is giving me a pile of free money, so I can't risk that kind of thing.
Not informational but I kept reading that as 'MicroVMS' which would be a scaled down version of the DEC VMS operating system?!? And I was trying to figure out if they had added containers or something to it.
It's in the very first body paragraph of the article:
"A new class of multi-tenant applications has emerged that all share the need to hand each end user their own dedicated execution environment in which to safely run code that the application developer did not write. AI coding assistants, interactive code environments, data analytics platforms, vulnerability scanners, and game servers that run user-supplied scripts all fit this pattern."
AI agents. Chatbot session of 8 hours is a lot. 16 vCPU might be useful when developing heavy application and agent need run application tests. You can think what infrastructure https://claude.ai/code needs.
SaaS offering the usage of LLMs via API. You want to launch something isolated, as quickly as possible, do the minimal amount of work and not have to throwaway all your state.
> Containers launch in seconds, yet their shared-kernel architecture requires significant custom hardening to safely contain untrusted code
That's literally why they made Fargate. It's managed firecracker VMs with containers. They invented firecracker for this purpose. This new product is competing with Fargate, but they don't mention Fargate at all in the announcement.
> you create a MicroVM Image by supplying a Dockerfile and code packaged as a zip artifact in Amazon S3
>
> MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime
So you're already using containers with this new thing, same as Fargate! And not only that, it's more limited in runtime than Fargate! The only thing different with this service is stateful file storage, which is actually a problem you later have to engineer around, which is why containers are stateless.
This smells like a competing team building something to capitalize on AI hype, but the product isn't differentiated enough for this to make sense long term. If this was a service called managed AI agents, and you added features specific to AI agents, that has value. But "here's Fargate with a different name" isn't gonna last.
I don't think Fargate fits for the use case they are describing. If you're running your own (trusted) code, then of course there's no reason to worry about containment threats. But the threat here is that you have to execute arbitrary, untrusted code that is presumptively malicious. It's a very different scenario and requires considerable measures to safeguard properly. You can't have a Fargate Task that runs multiple containers, one for each user, for instance, or even run multiple Fargate Task instances, one for each user, because you're still having them all share a virtual EC2 host (well technically a pool of EC2 servers but it's one hypervisor and shared virtual kernel, essentially) that would be compromised if any one container escapes. If you need true hypervisor-level host kernel isolation on a per-user basis due to the risk of containment, with guest worker microVM threads, plus the whole thing needs to scale and also needs to pause and restore very quickly and keep track of state upon restoration, it's actually a pretty hard challenge to build on AWS with existing tools. The problem arises with any interactive AI agent environment that scales on a per-user basis, for instance, but it also applies to any scenario in which the user needs to execute untrusted arbitrary code on your infrastructure in a sandbox. Fargate isn't the secure choice in that scenario; you would instead use VPC + EC2 + Firecracker + Docker (plus S3 and many others) and use a lot of orchestration scripting and fiddling with load balancers and the like to try to get everything working and scaling. When you combine it with tracking state and also restoring quickly from a paused or suspended state, I can see reasons why this might be the right choice if you want to implement something with an interactive AI agent that isolates at the per-user or per-session layer from the host kernel and is highly secured against containment escape and other vulnerabilities. I'm curious if anyone has used this for the use case described, maybe from AWS? Is this like the AgentCore orchestration that came out maybe like last year?
Pretty sure they invented Firecracker for Lambda. Iirc they were previously using a hot pool of EC2 instances behind the scenes with each customer getting their own instances and lambdas sharing capacity on an instance. Firecracker made it possible to spin up VMs in realtime instead of having spare capacity laying around.
That said, Fargate does kind of seem like a superior option
Edit: I guess this supports suspend and fast resume so invocation time should be somewhat better than Fargate.
I think they have one of the best sandbox environments on the market with pay per utilized resources pricing, it's a huge cost reduction for agentic workloads when you have 95%+ idle CPU time and occasional spikes for CPU heavy work (e.g. agent run tests or something like this).
I use railway to host my openclaw like personal agent for friends and family (9 instances) and it costs like 1-2$/mo with scale to zero.
Does this mean you effectively can't use them as long-lived developer environments? It sounds like even if you suspend them, this is the hard limit on the total time it can run.
It just a time limit of the life of a single MicroVM.
Using this for a long lived "developer environment" would be extraordinarily expensive anyhow. Scaling the vCPU + RAM cost of these to the same shape compute optimized Graviton On-Demand EC2 instance (16 vCPU x 32 GB RAM) shows about 4x the cost.
But I think the point is that they should be cheap to set up, and because of the short life, never really contain anything except the potential to compute when needed, not important data.
EFS is extremely slow for many workloads. We tried it for builds and various other common use cases for coding agents and the performance just isn't there. I'm guessing lots of small random reads/writes just isn't going to ever work well.
Interesting, I have recently started working on a project which is similar and fully open source, maybe interesting to some here. Happy to receive any kind of feedback on it.
> Didn't mean to highjack for self advertisement.
>
> As the topic matches, .... my project might be appealing to some here
That's exactly what you intended to do. That is the definition of advertising. It is true, many people might like it, so own it. Don't lie about it, even to yourself.
Can you provide a link to your project? Self-plugs are fairly common around here, and usually appreciated (or at least not frowned upon) when it comes with juicy source code.
You absolutely can run agents on a regular VM. But if you want to build multi-tenant and multi-agent systems with strong security boundaries, then having a VM or MicroVM per agent session (or session with a group of agents) really simplifies things.
When we did AWS AgentCore Runtime last year we introduced session isolation, with MicroVMs per session. You can think of Lambda MicroVMs as the same stack, but generalized to fit a larger number of application patterns.
Isn’t the point that you wanna be able to spin up and down thousands of VM:s on demand (literally a VM just to run a tool and then shut it down until the next tool call)
Are you guys literally spinning up agents where a 100 ms boot time vs a 3 seconds boot time makes a difference?
I'm asking because I understand the appeal of micro VMs but every time the subject comes up people talk about "isolating agents": what's wrong about isolating agents in a regular VM (or in a container which, itself, is in a VM)?
FWIW I've got my stuff nicely isolated in regular VMs that are regularly up for hours and hours.
It's like the microVMs boots in 100 ms, then the agent does... What? And exits after another 100ms and now you need to launch another one?
What's the use case of "microVMs to isolate agents"?
I imagine you can have a situation where you let an agent run in a shared env but to access certain tools you spin up a VM just for the tool call duration and then shut it down again. Let’s say you wanna allow the agent to write and run code then you need it to run it somewhere safe
Microvms are better for the VM provider. They use less memory and have a smaller attack surface. Also starting in 100ms means you don't need to add a bunch of async machinery when launching the vms.
imagine installing an agent in slack at a company with 1000 employees, and you want each request to have its own VM for data analysis, downloading repos and working on them, ...
regular VMs just use too much memory, a typical ubuntu uses 512 MB as a baseline
This seems roughly similar to Google's Cloud Run gen2 instance types. My understanding is with the second generation, they are running microvms which are bootstrapped from a container image.
1. We support more than 32GB disk (as a shareable device, ideal for agentic memory)
2. We provide egress control
3. We provide vault for secret injection (to counter prompt injection)
4. Snapshot / forking.
5. long lived sandboxes.
Fly.io doesn't set a maximum of 8 hours of alive time on your instance.
Also, MicroVMs can't be exposed directly to the web. Your code running in them can only be executed via API calls with attached auth tokens - so if you wanted to host a public facing API or website with them you'd need to implement your own additional layer in front.
Something I appreciate about Fly (disclaimer: they support my work) is that the pricing is fixed - you pay $1.94/month (less if you suspend your machine) for the smallest instance, up to $976.25/month for the largest (16 CPUs, 128GB) plus predictable costs for volume storage.
The only variable outside your control is bandwidth, and that's unlikely to cause a nasty shock.
Contrast with any of the more "elastic" hosting providers - Vercel, Cloud Run - and you're much less likely to get a horrifying bill if something gets overly-crawled or goes viral.
i’d say what AWS released looks closer to a bare compute primitive. E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.
also, there’s no lock-in, E2B is open-source and can be hosted on any cloud (AWS included).
plus supports bigger boxes, higher concurrency, longer timeouts (24hr).
There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there.
They do spike on different features like:
Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolated environments for your own work.I've been working on some open-core stuff[1] to coordinate sandboxes, and we're making changes to have a library that lets people coordinate any number of remote or local sandboxes using any provider, kinda like how the Docker CLI works for managing containers, git repos, and coding agents. Flue[2] is another player in this space, and is more of a pure framework, while we're building it as an interactive product for using sandboxed agents and workflows.
[1] https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika/blob/main/ROADMAP.md
[2]: https://flueframework.com/
Setting up your own is not that hard and if you bought some compute before the Altman squeeze, very cheap.
Def!
My personal belief is that the future of an "app" is a combo:
So, it should be stupid simple to run these local sandboxed apps/agents. Right now, not too hard for technical users (esp. with things like https://smolmachines.com/ and https://microsandbox.dev/), but not as easy as clicking an app icon or typing `/path/to/binary` in the CLII was going to add a comment praising smolmachines' smolvms. Simple, fast (sub-200ms cold start), OCI-compat, and has trivial packing to standalone 0-dep executables. No need for Docker Desktop / colima / orbstack. For those who prioritize security, kernel isolation is a meaningful benefit.
Microsandbox claims to start faster than docker, and it is isolated from the host, and to work with OCI. Why would I still want to use docker? The only reason I can imagine is that I actually want to be able to dynamically share resources between containers instead of dividing up VMs a priori.
Ah, the significant compute overhead: https://josecastillolema.github.io/podman-wasm-libkrun/. Much more cpu and ram usage at worse performance.
Why isn't libkrun good enough for hosted stuff? I use it as a podman backend in a microservice architecture.
Firecracker has more tooling for the orchestration layer that manages many sandboxes at once. Stuff like K8S integration, an external REST API control plane, more first-class support for snapshotting, etc.
You'd have to build more of that with libkrun
The core tech of both are great though.
What people aren't getting with `firecracker` is utilization. Don't get me wrong, `firecracker` is great software and it's what I'm using for lightweight virtualization, but workloads are really bursty over really short periods of time now, even with the snapshot and restore that you can get if you're willing to hack on `firecracker` substantially, you hit walls where it's like, this is too much against the grain, this thing wasn't designed to bounce from 1 core to 32 to 8 to 16 to 4 to 32 to 1 seamlessly, and that's what it takes to get extreme utilization even with extremely good ML on the prediction.
I am quite sure I'm not the only person working on post-firecracker KVM.
Thanks for sharing these!
For those looking to run agents: the short lifecycle of the typical “sandbox” seems surprisingly limiting to me. I have no actual workflow where I want one of these products. Sometimes a VM can live for 30 minutes, but it also might need to live for a month, and I don’t know beforehand.
This is why I have been avoiding the word sandbox for exe.dev. I don’t think developers agents need something “sandbox” shaped.
It's about time AWS got into the agent sandbox game.
The startups in this space right now don't provide much value on top of the cloud providers they're wrapping. They don't tend to be run by experienced infra people either so they seem very vibecoded, insecure, janky, etc. They're also significantly overpriced because they're marking up already expensive providers.
Something surprising from my own experience is that while there's certainly a huge role for async agents in cloud sandboxes, async agents running locally seem more useful in many cases.
AWS AgentCore runtime has been around for about a year: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguid... (spoiler, it's the same underlying technology as the Lambda MicroVMs).
To be fair to jacobgold, at this point there is more or less an AWS services announcement singularity: if you didn't see the announcement when it happened you may never catch up or even find it in the wretched console website.
Though I did know about this one! (Because I saw the announcement.)
It just seems pretty different to me? I've lots of similar stuff and yet I still don't understand what it's for and how it works after scanning the docs quickly.
Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.
In that case it's still overpriced because they're charging hyperscaler prices without offering a hyperscaler level service in terms of scalability, reliability, security, trust, etc.
Agreed.
Most of the startups are just wrappers around AWS and significantly more expensive.
Agents need sandboxes that are cheaper so that they can run thousands
I feel that AWS, GCP and all the other cloud providers can provide this natively.
But still it would be nice to self host.
The best part of self hosting is that you own it as well, no rug pulls from the laundry list of reselling providers that could go away at anytime.
It would be nice to have a one click sandbox agent on a self hosted instance that is, free, fast (can pay a bit more for more intensive operations) and that is open source.
We have this page which compares a whole bunch of sandbox providers in different categories
https://engine.build/lab/agent-sandboxes
Will add MicroVMs there today (and any others that are missing if you let me know!)
What's the best provider to self-host Firecracker? I feel that AWS is not a safe or cost-effective option for a self-funded startup or small business. Although is anything cost effective anymore? Hetzner just had a massive price hike.
Part of it might just be that I am old and inflation is catching up with my understanding of prices.
But as far as AWS I still have to say no thanks. Imagine some group actually started using my hosted AI agent service for something compute and network intensive. It could turn into $2000 overnight and if I didn't account for one of the numerous types of AWS charges, I might have only collected $500 for credits purchases.
Or it could easily be ten times that. But who am I kidding. No one is going to use my agents. So it doesn't matter if it's gvisor or Firecracker or whatever.
The simplest worthwhile DIY sandbox you can have is to layer two tools: bwrap and gvisor.
bwrap will set up the environment and then gvisor elevates it into a true sandbox.Standalone gvisor (not the 'do' subcommand) used to be a mess with the OCI json requirement, but recently they began work on presenting their own bwrap interface (likely to pursue AI agent uses) though I wouldn't use it myself yet.
People often look down on gvisor because they think it's some kind of syscall filter, it is not. It can use one of ptrace, seccomp or even KVM to intercept ALL syscalls and service them with it's own logic (which is in Go). Basically it's a VMM and kernel in one.
Are you looking for highly ephemeral nodes, where you are writing automation that will use the API to orchestrate it? Or do you just want small microVMs that you launch and kill?
Firecracker just has a ReSTful unix socket with a defined API and launches KVM vms with limited options.
For custom SMB I still think libvirt is a lower entry cost and may have transferable use cases to longer lived VMs, so you can just launch a qemu microvm[0] and use virsh and/or libvirt xml to set up the networking.
The ~400ms boot time of a qemu microvm vs ~120ms for firecracker may not be an issue for some loads, but qemu will also allow you a bit more density of placement than firecracker. qemu microvms will use a bit more memory individually, but they will also tend to use less real system memory with a larger number of microVMs.
It is all tradeoffs, and kata containers are yet another option that may apply depending on your use case.
You can run your own firecracker or qemu/kvm microvms on most instances that allow nested hypervisors, or on a local host. If cost containment is critical to you this is one possible way forward.
Really it just depends on if you want/need ReSTful control, or need to support short lived serverless functions, or if CLIs fit better and you many want to support full VMs.
They both are just Virtual Machine Monitors that targeted different use cases and decided on different tradeoffs.
Just be careful about hosting traditional containers and microVMs on the same system, that config is going to be problematic do to fundamental reasons that are too complex to properly address here.
[0] https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/i386/microvm.html
Thanks. I just looked into qemu microvms. Might be an option but I already have gvisor set up.
Why do you want to self-host vs. using one of the many providers out there?
Daytona, E2B, OpenComputer, Freestyle, Blaxel, Vercel, Modal, Cloudflare, Tensorlake, Superserve, etc. etc.
Some of them work by pre-purchasing credits, so you can control the blast radius of spend.
Also, if you want a more embedded sandbox runtime as a library instead of a daemon + REST API, you can check out libkrun (and friendly layers on top of it like https://microsandbox.dev/ and https://smolmachines.com/)
self host = better spec machine for same price.
Even with the Hetzner price increase, it is still far cheaper than all of them with self-hosting.
Hetzner is still cheap compared to AWS.
You can't run firecracker on AWS.
You can with the newer instances that suport nested VM. There was a recent story about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48556561.
Yes you can.
Yeah, the big 3 cloud markup is so high that most VPS providers can hike price 10x and they are still cheaper.
For self-hosting, have a look at what we're building with SlicerVM.com (disclosure: I'm the founder). Also runs just as well on Apple Silicon.
We run quite a few Slicer instances on mini PCs and Ryzen builds - also on Hetzner (and yes ouch 120 EUR / mo up to ~ 550 EUR / mo for 16core / 128GB RAM feels almost unfair)
Interesting. How does this compare to Firecracker? Also PhoenixNap looks really interesting. Do you happen to know if Linux software compatibility holds up on Ampere? 80 cores for $400 a month seems pretty good.
This reminds me of Fly.io's model off the top of my head, though its not a self-hosted firecracker as such.
I specifically complained to a fly.io staff on here about their "gotcha, b*tch" usage based pricing which they basically copied from AWS, and they stood by it and other people here backed them up. No one is giving me a pile of free money, so I can't risk that kind of thing.
Cloudflare is cost effective for certain types of workloads, I've heard of businesses getting surprisingly far on the $5/mo worker plan.
At my day job, workers and sqlite-backed durable objects that quickly hibernate and quickly resume are quite nice, I prefer that to standard lambda.
Not informational but I kept reading that as 'MicroVMS' which would be a scaled down version of the DEC VMS operating system?!? And I was trying to figure out if they had added containers or something to it.
I am wondering what type of workload this is for.
They give a tiny example and insist on micro, fast start, but the say it lasts up to 8 hours and is up to 16 vCPU.
What sort of app require faster boot (than lambda or ec2), but only for a limited interval, and with possibly plenty of processing power...
Maybe I am not the right target, but if you have examples so that I can better appreciate, I'd love that
It's in the very first body paragraph of the article:
"A new class of multi-tenant applications has emerged that all share the need to hand each end user their own dedicated execution environment in which to safely run code that the application developer did not write. AI coding assistants, interactive code environments, data analytics platforms, vulnerability scanners, and game servers that run user-supplied scripts all fit this pattern."
AI agents. Chatbot session of 8 hours is a lot. 16 vCPU might be useful when developing heavy application and agent need run application tests. You can think what infrastructure https://claude.ai/code needs.
SaaS offering the usage of LLMs via API. You want to launch something isolated, as quickly as possible, do the minimal amount of work and not have to throwaway all your state.
This smells like a competing team building something to capitalize on AI hype, but the product isn't differentiated enough for this to make sense long term. If this was a service called managed AI agents, and you added features specific to AI agents, that has value. But "here's Fargate with a different name" isn't gonna last.
I don't think Fargate fits for the use case they are describing. If you're running your own (trusted) code, then of course there's no reason to worry about containment threats. But the threat here is that you have to execute arbitrary, untrusted code that is presumptively malicious. It's a very different scenario and requires considerable measures to safeguard properly. You can't have a Fargate Task that runs multiple containers, one for each user, for instance, or even run multiple Fargate Task instances, one for each user, because you're still having them all share a virtual EC2 host (well technically a pool of EC2 servers but it's one hypervisor and shared virtual kernel, essentially) that would be compromised if any one container escapes. If you need true hypervisor-level host kernel isolation on a per-user basis due to the risk of containment, with guest worker microVM threads, plus the whole thing needs to scale and also needs to pause and restore very quickly and keep track of state upon restoration, it's actually a pretty hard challenge to build on AWS with existing tools. The problem arises with any interactive AI agent environment that scales on a per-user basis, for instance, but it also applies to any scenario in which the user needs to execute untrusted arbitrary code on your infrastructure in a sandbox. Fargate isn't the secure choice in that scenario; you would instead use VPC + EC2 + Firecracker + Docker (plus S3 and many others) and use a lot of orchestration scripting and fiddling with load balancers and the like to try to get everything working and scaling. When you combine it with tracking state and also restoring quickly from a paused or suspended state, I can see reasons why this might be the right choice if you want to implement something with an interactive AI agent that isolates at the per-user or per-session layer from the host kernel and is highly secured against containment escape and other vulnerabilities. I'm curious if anyone has used this for the use case described, maybe from AWS? Is this like the AgentCore orchestration that came out maybe like last year?
Pretty sure they invented Firecracker for Lambda. Iirc they were previously using a hot pool of EC2 instances behind the scenes with each customer getting their own instances and lambdas sharing capacity on an instance. Firecracker made it possible to spin up VMs in realtime instead of having spare capacity laying around.
That said, Fargate does kind of seem like a superior option
Edit: I guess this supports suspend and fast resume so invocation time should be somewhat better than Fargate.
Fargate does not use Firecracker, it is simply ec2 instances.
Source?
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir... says
> Battle-Tested – Firecracker has been battled-tested and is already powering multiple high-volume AWS services including AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.
the doc is out of date
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
Shouldn’t the title be “AWS Lambda MicroVMs”? MicroVMs are an existing concept.
Yeah, I'm surprised Justin posted this like it was new(s). Wasn't it doing the rounds on the 22nd when it launched?
I didn't post it 3 hours ago, it must have gone through the magic HN re-up process.
Added support for configuring and running these directly from beamshell (.com). Really cool being able to spin these and use them any mcp client.
beamshell microvm deploy && beamshell microvm run
From last week: MicroVMs in Proxmox
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/06/18/1845
https://github.com/rcarmo/pve-microvm
No one talks about new Railway Sandboxes - https://docs.railway.com/sandboxes
I think they have one of the best sandbox environments on the market with pay per utilized resources pricing, it's a huge cost reduction for agentic workloads when you have 95%+ idle CPU time and occasional spikes for CPU heavy work (e.g. agent run tests or something like this).
I use railway to host my openclaw like personal agent for friends and family (9 instances) and it costs like 1-2$/mo with scale to zero.
Have you tried using unikraft? I think it might be cheaper imo. Worth a try.
Does anyone understand the pricing? The pricing page says “Lambda MicroVMs are priced per instance-second” but MicroVM’s aren’t otherwise mentioned.
Click on the "MicroVMs" tab of the pricing page: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
> MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime
Does this mean you effectively can't use them as long-lived developer environments? It sounds like even if you suspend them, this is the hard limit on the total time it can run.
It just a time limit of the life of a single MicroVM.
Using this for a long lived "developer environment" would be extraordinarily expensive anyhow. Scaling the vCPU + RAM cost of these to the same shape compute optimized Graviton On-Demand EC2 instance (16 vCPU x 32 GB RAM) shows about 4x the cost.
So don't do that. Just use an EC2 instance.
But these have near instant suspended/resume, and they even have vertical scaling of the ram, which is a great feature that’s not very common.
In theory, you could set up a process to move data/filesystem between sessions into and out of s3.
They are long-lived if you're a mayfly.
But I think the point is that they should be cheap to set up, and because of the short life, never really contain anything except the potential to compute when needed, not important data.
You can use them for dev environments.
You just have to finish development in 8 hours.
lambdas are ephemeral on compute, but couldn't you connect up EFS for your long lived data?
then when you launch the next one, its like you are still there?
EFS is extremely slow for many workloads. We tried it for builds and various other common use cases for coding agents and the performance just isn't there. I'm guessing lots of small random reads/writes just isn't going to ever work well.
I'm assuming you can launch them again after 8 hours.
Interesting, I have recently started working on a project which is similar and fully open source, maybe interesting to some here. Happy to receive any kind of feedback on it.
https://github.com/mitos-run/mitos
> Didn't mean to highjack for self advertisement. > > As the topic matches, .... my project might be appealing to some here
That's exactly what you intended to do. That is the definition of advertising. It is true, many people might like it, so own it. Don't lie about it, even to yourself.
.
Can you provide a link to your project? Self-plugs are fairly common around here, and usually appreciated (or at least not frowned upon) when it comes with juicy source code.
I don’t get it we are paying at least hundreds or maybe thousands per month on ai costs. Just get a regular vm ?
You absolutely can run agents on a regular VM. But if you want to build multi-tenant and multi-agent systems with strong security boundaries, then having a VM or MicroVM per agent session (or session with a group of agents) really simplifies things.
When we did AWS AgentCore Runtime last year we introduced session isolation, with MicroVMs per session. You can think of Lambda MicroVMs as the same stack, but generalized to fit a larger number of application patterns.
Isn’t the point that you wanna be able to spin up and down thousands of VM:s on demand (literally a VM just to run a tool and then shut it down until the next tool call)
What's the point of microVMs for running agents?
Are you guys literally spinning up agents where a 100 ms boot time vs a 3 seconds boot time makes a difference?
I'm asking because I understand the appeal of micro VMs but every time the subject comes up people talk about "isolating agents": what's wrong about isolating agents in a regular VM (or in a container which, itself, is in a VM)?
FWIW I've got my stuff nicely isolated in regular VMs that are regularly up for hours and hours.
It's like the microVMs boots in 100 ms, then the agent does... What? And exits after another 100ms and now you need to launch another one?
What's the use case of "microVMs to isolate agents"?
I imagine you can have a situation where you let an agent run in a shared env but to access certain tools you spin up a VM just for the tool call duration and then shut it down again. Let’s say you wanna allow the agent to write and run code then you need it to run it somewhere safe
Microvms are better for the VM provider. They use less memory and have a smaller attack surface. Also starting in 100ms means you don't need to add a bunch of async machinery when launching the vms.
This is for people who want both faster execution, and better security isolation for agents/subagents. It is a different use case than yours
I understand that but micro VMs don't provide better security isolation than regular VMs.
So that leaves faster boot times.
Faster boot times and then the agent does what? And at how many token/s? And what's the "time to first token" anyway?
How do the time to first token and then the token/s inherent limitations of LLMs not totally dominate the running time?
I just don't get the use case.
imagine installing an agent in slack at a company with 1000 employees, and you want each request to have its own VM for data analysis, downloading repos and working on them, ...
regular VMs just use too much memory, a typical ubuntu uses 512 MB as a baseline
This seems roughly similar to Google's Cloud Run gen2 instance types. My understanding is with the second generation, they are running microvms which are bootstrapped from a container image.
What does the actual startup latency look like? Does it depend on the size of the resulting image?
I tried this a few days ago. Once you have an image built and ready startup time is fast, but building that original image took 5-10 minutes.
I think it's designed for building an image once and then reusing it many, many times.
Not so subtle plug for another sandbox provider, https://instavm.io :
Apart from the above features.
Everything supported in APIs and CLI for agents.Can be used via - npx skills add instavm/skills
How does this compare to Fly.io
Which is more cheaper for me?
Ideally maybe self hosting would be better?
Fly.io doesn't set a maximum of 8 hours of alive time on your instance.
Also, MicroVMs can't be exposed directly to the web. Your code running in them can only be executed via API calls with attached auth tokens - so if you wanted to host a public facing API or website with them you'd need to implement your own additional layer in front.
Something I appreciate about Fly (disclaimer: they support my work) is that the pricing is fixed - you pay $1.94/month (less if you suspend your machine) for the smallest instance, up to $976.25/month for the largest (16 CPUs, 128GB) plus predictable costs for volume storage.
The only variable outside your control is bandwidth, and that's unlikely to cause a nasty shock.
Contrast with any of the more "elastic" hosting providers - Vercel, Cloud Run - and you're much less likely to get a horrifying bill if something gets overly-crawled or goes viral.
Fly.io's Sprites [1] do offer public web access as an option. They also have dynamic pricing.
https://sprites.dev
How does this compare to E2B?
e2b supports UDP and the pricing structure is different.
i’d say what AWS released looks closer to a bare compute primitive. E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.
also, there’s no lock-in, E2B is open-source and can be hosted on any cloud (AWS included).
plus supports bigger boxes, higher concurrency, longer timeouts (24hr).
disclaimer: i work at E2B
does it have gpu support?
check this out https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
will have a hosted platform soon with GPU support (vulkan)
It is supposed to be a sandbox that you can invoke from agent, langchains of the world, coding agents etc.
No, it doesn’t seem like it.
Not that I can find in the docs anywhere. Compute only.
How's this different from Firecracker?
Presumably it is Firecracker. It's just a different shape of offering, along with Lambda and Fargate, which are also Firecracker.
The literal first paragraph has a highlighted link that says this runs on Firecracker
It's a product that runs on top of Firecracker.